| Brief History | Fairbridge’s website (www.fairbridge.asn.au ) gives the following outline:
Fairbridge as an organisation has been in Western Australia since 1912, originally under the auspices of Fairbridge Society based in England with a local Western Australian Board. In 1983 the Western Australian Board incorporated in their own right as Fairbridge Western Australia Incorporated and has since provided services to all young people of Western Australia….
Kingsley Fairbridge’s “vision splendid”, as he called it, began in 1897 when he was working at his father’s Gold Belt property in Rhodesia (Zimbabwe). At the age of twelve, Kingsley struggled with a lack of expertise, loneliness and the scarcity of food. Climbing in the steep and slippery hills, he would look into the deep valleys where the grass was six feet high and wish that he could see a farm. While starved and miserable, the vision came to him. Some day he would bring farmers here and they would prosper.
In 1903, at the age of 17, Kingsley visited his grandmother in England and was distressed to see the streets full of poor children, grubby and exhausted from the lack of fresh air and food. He saw workhouses filled with children, orphanages bursting at the seams, and the overall waste of young lives not able to reach their potential. His vision grew.
Six years later, on the 19th of October, 1909, after addressing and gaining support from a meeting of forty-nine of his fellow Rhodes Scholars at the Colonial Club, Kingsley established the Child Emigration Society.
Fairbridge Farm Schools became an incorporated body in 1909, founded at the University of Oxford in England. It was the realisation of his dream.
Kingsley wanted to see little children shedding the bondage of bitter circumstances and stretching their legs and minds amid the thousand interests of the farm. The aim was to provide children with a sense of self worth, and the training and skills necessary for their future in the sparsely populated rural areas of the British Empire.
On the 15th of April, 1912, Kingsley Fairbridge and his young wife Ruby arrived in Albany, Western Australia, from England and made their way to Pinjarra, arriving on the 16th of July in that same year to establish the first Fairbridge Farm School on a property south of the town. They had no knowledge of the local conditions - soil, weather, timber - or the daily life of a farmer in the south-west of Western Australia, but in January 1913 they welcomed their first guests, a party of thirteen children from England. By the end of that year, the first Fairbridge Farm School consisted of thirty-three children, one man, two hired boys, one horse, one cow, two pigs, seventy head of poultry, a four room house, and a kitchen made of scrap iron walls.
Kingsley knew the small property was unsuitable for his plans for practical education and to cater for the number of children he wanted to assist so he and Ruby returned to England in 1919 to raise money to purchase 3200 acres north of Pinjarra. The land was purchased in 1920 and in 1921 Kingsley began the work of erecting cottages, a dining hall, his family home and farm buildings. But the constant worry about funding and the hard work took its toll.
Kingsley Fairbridge died on the 19th of July, 1924, in Perth, Western Australia, at the age of thirty-nine from a mixture of hard work, re-occurring bouts of malaria and what is thought today to have been cancer of the hip. He was sadly missed by Ruby, their four children, and his extended family - the children of Fairbridge.
But this talented and energetic man, who died tragically young, did not die in vain. His vision lived on and by 1939 over a thousand children came to the Fairbridge Farm School….
During the war years, no more children arrived from England and the farm school worked with those children still in residence, while continuing to support those who were out in the work force. Old Fairbridgians joined the Armed Forces with enthusiasm and by December 1942 there were 500 in uniform.
The Country Women’s Association, only too aware of labour shortages on farms, sent young women to Fairbridge to train in farm work, and in 1943 the Australian Women's Land Army, which attracted some Fairbridge girls, took over first Lawley and then Scratton cottages.
Guildford Grammar School boys lived at Fairbridge from April, 1942, to November, 1943, when their own school was appropriated by the American Medical Corps, and following their departure a large number of Dutch children who had been trapped in the Dutch East Indies (Indonesia) during the war were evacuated to Fairbridge while relatives were traced to enable reunion with their families.
With the passing of the Children Act in England in 1948, and alterations to legislation governing child migration, Fairbridge contrived to find itself a post-war future. By June, 1949, seventy-two children were in residence but as the inspector from the Department of Immigration noted, a tremendous amount of work and expenditure was required to bring the buildings and grounds up to pre-war standards. A new policy of smaller numbers in each cottage was followed, and during the 1950s there was an increasing emphasis on ‘scientific’ treatment of children. Many of the boys were apprenticed, although about half still trained as farmers, and many of the girls went into nursing.
However attempts to re-establish Fairbridge as it had been were failing, and in 1956 the Fairbridge Society in London promoted the idea of accepting children with one parent. Most often, these were children of war widows who traveled to Australia in the hope of finding better living conditions. The Farm School sheltered and educated the children, while the parent sought work. In 1960 the Commonwealth Government refused to nominate Fairbridge Farm School as the sole institution in Australia for child migrants, and the State Department of Child Welfare stopped subsidising child migration. In September, 1960, the London Committee contacted all four Fairbridge institutions (Molong in New South Wales, Tresca in Tasmania, Prince of Wales Farm School on Vancouver Island, and Fairbridge Farm School, Pinjarra) to confirm that British children were no longer available.
In 1961 the Big Brother Movement began to send seventeen and eighteen year old boys to Fairbridge, and single parent families continued to arrive until 1980, however by 1981 the dream was over and the Farm School closed its doors. The total number of children assisted by Fairbridge from January 1913 until it closed was 3,580.
Departmental files indicate that aid was given in 1923, but that no subsidy was paid to children.
The WELSTAT (welfare statistics) Collection of 1979 notes the “Fairbridge Farm Cottage 1-13” as a ‘clustered group homes’ (ie. “a family group home whose grounds adjoin those of another family group home, or other residential child care establishment, operated by the same enterprise”) that was operated by an agency other than the Department.
In the Report of the Interim Consultative Committee on Residential Child Care of 1980/81, an appraisal of the facility is noted: “Following the request from the Hon. Minister for Community Welfare (Mr. R. Young) the Committee visited Fairbridge and have studied that operation. An interim report was sent to Mr. Young’s office on 13th February 1980, and we trust the business will be concluded shortly. It appears the present concept of Fairbridge is not conducive to modern child care.”
A more detailed chronology of major events, admissions and discharges is included in Tables 12 and 13. |